Senior Staff Backend Engineer — AI Platform Lead

Pinterest; United States; Hybrid; USD 209,000 - 429,000; Full time

Job summary

Pinterest is seeking a Sr. Staff Backend Engineer to lead the backend platform for Pinterest Assistant, shaping architecture and scale for millions of users.

You’ll define strategy, mentor engineers, and collaborate with Product, Design, ML, and Infrastructure to deliver multimodal, AI-powered experiences. You’ll drive memory, personalization, orchestration, tool integrations, and APIs, balancing rapid iteration with long-term maintainability, while upholding production standards and security

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science or equivalent experience.
• 10+ years of backend software engineering experience powering consumer experiences.
• 3+ years as a technical lead designing large-scale distributed backends.
• Strong backend experience in Python, TypeScript, Node or similar.
• Experience building platforms or foundational infrastructure enabling product teams.
• Strong understanding of model-driven systems and collaboration with ML engineers.
• Leadership, communication and cross-functional collaboration skills.
• Familiarity with retrieval, ranking, personalization, inference, context management, or orchestration.
• Proven mentoring of senior engineers and elevating engineering quality.
• Product-minded and execution-oriented; can lead in ambiguity.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive the technical vision and architecture for the backend systems powering Pinterest Assistant, ensuring they scale reliably as the product reaches millions of users.
• Lead the design and implementation of the core Assistant platform including orchestration, memory and personalization, context management, APIs, tool integrations, and backend infrastructure.
• Drive technical strategy, identifying foundational platform investments that unlock new Assistant capabilities while improving developer velocity, reliability, and scalability.
• Partner closely with Product, Design, Frontend engineers, ML engineers, and Infrastructure teams to build a deeply personalized, multimodal conversational experience.
• Shape the architecture for AI-powered applications, including retrieval, context assembly, tool execution, memory, and model orchestration, in partnership with ML teams.
• Establish engineering best practices for production LLM and agent systems, including observability, logging, evals, safety mechanisms, rollout strategies, and incident response.
• Mentor engineers, raising the technical bar through architecture reviews, technical guidance, and thoughtful engineering leadership.
• Navigate ambiguity and make pragmatic architectural decisions that balance rapid product iteration with long-term maintainability.
• Influence technical direction beyond the immediate team by collaborating across teams and helping shape Pinterest’s broader AI platform strategy.
• Stay current with advances in LLMs, agentic systems, and backend platform design, and apply them pragmatically to consumer product development.

Skills

Backend engineering

Python

TypeScript

Node.js

Leadership

Cross-functional collaboration

Communication

ML collaboration

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS or equivalent

Tools

Python ecosystem

APIs

LLMs tooling

Job description

Pinterest is seeking a Sr. Staff Backend Engineer to lead the backend platform for Pinterest Assistant, shaping architecture and scale for millions of users.

You’ll define strategy, mentor engineers, and collaborate with Product, Design, ML, and Infrastructure to deliver multimodal, AI-powered experiences. You’ll drive memory, personalization, orchestration, tool integrations, and APIs, balancing rapid iteration with long-term maintainability, while upholding production standards and security